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9 thoughts on “Attend the 2012 Philip K. Dick Festival”

During festival weekend, we will be celebrating by presenting 800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick, by Victoria Stewart here in Pittsburgh. So check out the link, tell us what you think, and if you start to stink try Ubik.

Curious that the four “featured” guest-speakers are all considered academics, not long time PKD fans. Where’s Bruce Gillespie, Uwe Anton, Gregg Rickman, etc.???? Also most curious that this so called “festival” is being held at SFSU whereat it just so happens Mr. Gill teaches as a Lecturer. And it’s not being held over the traditional Labor Day holiday weekend…Hmmm…

If one were trying to be open-minded, realistic, pragmatic and non-cliquish about the above poster, it gets stupider and stupider each time you read it. Not very well thought out or done, both layout and design, and in particular the choice of text. Just think, if all 10 people who decide to go get just their ass to San Francisco, you’r going to have just a bunch of asses hanging around. A really bad ad indeed.

Any festival poster which champions Laurence Rickels as an ‘attraction’ will have the opposite effect on me. I think his work is typical of those whose ‘studies’ of Philip K.Dick are merely thinly veiled exercises in self-importance and self-promotion.

Many new Phil Dick fans might be persuaded that only narrow ‘scholarly’ readings of Phil (in the dry style of post-modern Lit Crit. bereft of joy, passion and the very ‘music’ of the work) are worthwhile. I am glad I went to the UK PKD Celebration weekend way back in 1991 – where I met the great Paul Williams and impressive Gregg Rickman (not to mention Lawrence Sutin, Brian Aldiss, Andrew M.Butler, and Ernesto Spinelli).

No fevered egos competing to sit one seat higher at the table – and a healthy balance of intelligent opinion.

I wasn’t going to mention the poster – but if you are asking… I think the poster is poor. I would never choose Arnie as Phil Dick Poster-Boy (an image of Phil would serve the event far better) – the tone of the content strikes the wrong note for me, and the font is all wrong (illegible at any distance). Along with the poor circular ‘Festival’ logo, Phil deserves better.

I can only hope the event turns out to be less insular than it appears.

Yes, Phil does indeed deserve much better. I found the poster too cluttered, poorly designed, and badly worded. Hopefully they didn’t pay someone to design it for them. Ditto on Paul Williams. And why aren’t names like Bruce Gillespie, Gregg Rickman, Uwe Anton featured on the poster instead of obfuscatory academics? Who is this “festival” supposed to be for, Philip K. Dick, or SFSU and Mr. Gill?

I’ll be there and a boatload of PKD fans such as Laura Entwistle and Frank Hollander who are not academics, and Jonathan Lethem and Rudy Rucker will both be there too – some writers. Don’t know anything about Rickels and some of the other professors but David Gill is a total Dickhead and Erik Davis too! It should be fun. Maybe our combined PKDness will enable us to levitate the SFSU Campus to the moon and turn it into the Bonds of Erotic Poymorphism whorehouse!

Philip K. Dick

An online community for followers of Philip K. Dick, old and new, along with the promotion of his work and the sharing of information, text, audio or visual that pertains to his life, his work and his legacy. Includes news, articles, criticism, interviews, biography, synopses of major works, reviews, links, and much more.

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‘The cross took the form of a crossbow, with Christ as the arrow…’ The interview with Philip K. Dick embedded below, recorded in Santa Ana on May 17, 1979, touches on many of the author’s experiences and obsessions—the combat his father saw in World War I, how he came to join the Episco...